These are difficult times for everyone, but the financial crisis that continues to roil economies throughout the world impacts young people with particular severity. Entry level jobs in the recording industry— always difficult to snare — are harder to find than ever before, making it necessary for aspiring engineers to pay for an education that may never result in a career.
In London, a community-based not-for-profit organization, IMS Studios (Islington Music Workshop), offers a range of courses in music and sound production. IMW recently purchased four Solid State Logic consoles to give students the experience they’ll need as they move into the highly competitive field of recording.
“IMW is an independent not-for-profit educational organization established 30 years ago to provide professional training for sound-related industries for students within the community and was the first base for Oscar- and Grammy-winning producer Paul Epworth,” says John Dennis, the founding director of IMW. “We have just completed our new campus expansion that includes four studios within two minutes of each other. We have very successfully used an SSL 4000 series for the past 15 years, so we already knew the SSL brand for its sound quality and reliability. Technology and the way people record and mix music has changed, so we needed to invest in equipment that could provide a pathway that included both traditional and in-the-box recording. That equipment is from SSL.”
The newly acquired SSL boards (Duality SE, AWS 949, Matrix, Nucleus) will join the Matrix console that IMW has been using to train its students for several years. “We are taking young musicians out of the box and into the real world of audio,” says John Dennis. “They are used to working on a laptop with headphones, or making cheap demos, for example, so they have not really developed their critical listening skills. We take them through the various levels of production to develop a very high level of critical listening in the Duality Room. The critical listening and production techniques we teach depend on the quality and industry leadership of SSL. With SSL our students learn to craft sound, not fix it.”
